


Finding Something

by secret_stories



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Reunion Fic, Slow Burn, post season 6 finale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 04:03:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6784405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secret_stories/pseuds/secret_stories
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now another voice would join those dead ones, now another mess of skin and bone and blood had gone down into the dark. Never to feel the incessant hammering of rain on skin. Never to see the grey blur of the sky, with eyes alive or dead. That man had made sure of that, far too sure, leaving pieces unrecognisable on that bleak road, on that long aching night. </p>
<p>------</p>
<p>Set almost immediately after the group's encounter with Negan, this follows team family as they deal with the loss of another family member as well as the situation they find themselves in. </p>
<p>Around the same time, we follow Beth on her journey of re discovery as she re learns who she is after waking up at Grady with a hole in her head. </p>
<p>There will be an eventual reunion!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding Something

**Author's Note:**

> I have been on a giant hiatus from every kind of writing and just work up with the words for this so am hoping it will motivate me to pick up a couple of my other fics that I totally , shamefully, abandoned.

_Daryl_

It was raining again, or perhaps, it was raining still. A damp oppressing moisture hung over everything and at night the gentle drip or deafening hammering would fill dreams with a world underwater. Fat drops still penetrating the rippling surface and making the people below impossibly wetter. Their saturated clothes not billowing in the all encompassing blue, but instead hanging, heavy, limp, gluing to desperate bodies and dragging those left standing further down with every drop of the deluge. Trickling down into the darkness.

It would take them all with it eventually, down into that deep nothing where death goes to die and new life is born in the quiet earth. He yearned for it, ached for that soft nothing where the rain couldn’t touch. But here they were, just more cold bodies struggling through the downpour, indistinguishable from those who had begun to rot without that quiet peace, dragging through the grey blur that was the world in the rain. What was left of it. _We ain’t them_ , he’d told his brother, he’d told himself. Now he wasn’t so sure. The walking dead, those left to wander, forced to heave limb and bone forwards with no course in mind, a hellish limbo. Nothing beat in those cavernous chests, no moisture pricked those hollow eyes. None but the rain. He wasn’t too sure he could see the difference any more.

What did words mean anymore, _useless paltry things_ , he’d heard that before. Words flit through dreams now, voices of the dead echoed through those drowned visions that came in the rustling darkness. Never hers, those words were lost to him now, seeped away into the depths with the last ray of sunshine, cast into shadows by the unending rain.

They walked again, and those trickles clung to the trees, hung from leaves, burned down fingers. At least they weren’t thirsty.

Now another voice would join those dead ones, now another mess of skin and bone and blood had gone down into the dark. Never to feel the incessant hammering of rain on skin. Never to see the grey blur of the sky, with eyes alive or dead. That man had made sure of that, far too sure, leaving pieces unrecognisable on that bleak road, on that long aching night. Another loss etched and burned, torturously scraped onto them all. Those flecks of blood had twinkled in the lights, sparkling like diamonds, like the precious commodity it was these days. Living blood. Not red in that half light but black and deep, like the nights sky itself. It had gone far, the swing of that bat sending everything that made another family member who he was, across the land. It wouldn’t even reach the earth through the rough tarmac.

Fever was setting in now, of that he was sure. Every step was a gamble, every breath a conscious effort, but there was no choice. We are the walking dead . They had to walk. He had long lost the ability to think past these fevered blurring of words.

‘We have to get him back, Maggie’s barely doing better and who the fuck even knows what is waiting for us back home.’

Words, in the darkness drifted across the fire to where he lay, huddled in the borrowed blanket, drenched in sweat and crusted blood. He turned his head, the movement sending shooting stars of pain down his shoulder. Michonne and Rick sat huddled near by, sheltered from the rain under a rough shelter that covered them all from the rain, if barely. Whoever had set it up had done it all wrong, used the wrong wood, the wrong leaves, laid it wrong. He knew this but somehow couldn’t find any energy to persuade his aching head to find the words, nor the memory of it being set up at all. Other shapes, nestled in the shadowy quiet, the other Greene sister, close to him, head resting on her husband’s lap while he dozed against a tree trunk. Her face white, sheened in sweat, hair pulled back, she shivered with the trees. Had they been this bad off before? That gunshot, the pain that felt akin to the ripping burn that came when she fell in that hospital hallway and had stayed with him, was an ache now that spread across his entire body. It was infected, inevitably, it must be infected.

‘Don’t. Home has to be fine, they need it to stay intact, or they’ll get nothing from us. It has to be ok there. We’re so close, if we were all walking normally, we would have been back yesterday.’ Rick’s anxious voice slipped through the damp air.

‘Then I’m gonna go. We know where we are, I can be at Alexandria by morning, get a truck and be back to pick you all up. Maggie and Daryl can’t be out here anymore. We can’t lose anyone else. Not after that. Two nights is too long to be out in this goddam rain.’ So fiercely strong, if anyone were to pull them out of this, it would be Michonne.

Rick shook his head and looked at her with a deep sigh, squeezing the bridge of his nose. ‘Fine, I don’t see that we have another choice. But no way in hell you’re going alone. I’m coming with you, we don’t know what’s waiting for us.’

They grasped each others arms as the rain hurtled down a little harder.

‘If you come, Carl will come, and that doesn’t leave enough here to fight if something happens. Maggie and Daryl are dead weight, Eugene isn’t a fighter, Rosita and Sasha are wrecks right now and Glenn’s main focus is his wife. That leaves Aaron, and as great as he is, he can’t look after them all, alone. No Rick, I’m going by myself.’

As the rain steadily hammered down through the trees, an owl screeched. Rick and Michonne’s voices faded. The darkness settled around him until he couldn’t hear anything but a distant song echoing through the depths of his fevered mind.

When he next woke, it was to doors slamming, shouts, an engine rumbling beneath him. Warm bodies squashed either side of him and the sound of the gate grinding open; they were home, one friend short. And there, through it all, the sound of birds and breeze. The rain had finally stopped.


End file.
